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BENGALURU: Infosys chief executive Vishal Sikka on Monday gave a glimpse of futuristic bets that India's second largest software exporter is making in areas such as virtual reality and said that the company would move more aggressively towards deploying automation across top customer projects and push towards using existing resources better by reducing its bench.

Reiterating his vision of making Infosys a $20 billion company by 2020, Sikka also for the first time spoke about some of the futuristic work that Infosys is doing with marquee customers such as Toyota Motor Corp in areas such as driverless cars and automated driving.

"We see now digital connectivity, we see now computing making its way into places where they were never before -- so if you look at some places where we inhabit, cars for example, assistive driving, driverless car infrastructure has become quite commonplace...assistive driving capabilities are there in every car now...we do a lot of this work, we do a lot of this work in our own driving and automation of the driving experience for companies like Toyota and Boeing and so forth," Sikka said at the Kotak "Chasing Growth" conference in Mumbai.

Sikka, who served as products chief at SAP prior to Infosys and is widely seen as the brains behind SAP's blockbuster HANA platform, outlined some of the bets that the company is also making in areas such as virtual reality.

"We had these virtual reality equipment from Oculus -- virtual reality gives a tremendous opportunity to reimagine the physical world. Already the virtual reality glasses are close to the precision and resolution of the physical world around us, so it is actually possible to create a replica of walking around in Burberry, Regent Street store or in the Macy's Union Street store and do your purchases without leaving your homes." said Sikka.

For other long-time outsourcing customers such as General Electric, Infosys is currently working on projects in areas such as industrial internet and also on technology components of machines such as landing gears for airplanes that GE builds.

"What we can think of services that can transcend space and time constraints. One example of this is the work we have done with GE -- the landing gear traditionally used to have four sensors and the landing gear is an incredibly important part of an airplane..these systems need to have 100% reliability otherwise people die. We have recently together with GE instrumented these landing gears around 30 additional sensors..we can basically do everything that we can think of on the digital twin of the landing gear. All its operational behaviour, its operational parameters, its health, predicting its useful remaining life and how it intersects with the number of remaining flights planned, things like that," explained Sikka.

Bangalore-based Infosys is also working on home automation projects with GE currently. ET had reported in April last year that Infosys was making bets in areas such as home automation and Internet of Things, as part of Sikka's broader vision.

"(Another) key area is the home where connected living and more intelligent infrastructure has become a common thing. GE of course is leading the charge there -- we do a lot of work with GE," said Sikka.

Sikka also reiterated that Infosys wanted to bring up revenue productivity over the next four years to about $80,000 per employee, from current levels of $50,000 per employee.

"We obviously hear about the threat of automation and what it will do to jobs -- I have always viewed that as an opportunity for automation because our ability to model complex systems is fundamentally limited to our understanding of it, the way it used to be, whereas systems of course continue to evolve," said Sikka.

"The shift to automation is inevitable. There is no doubt that it will happen, there's no doubt that it is already happening. It is not to make the horses run faster and faster or to feed them better or to give them better scheduling -- it is to turn the horse-cart into an automobile," he added.

Infosys will also strive to reduce its bench through the Zero Bench initiative that the company has put in place internally, Sikka said.

"81% utilization means 9000 people are sitting on the bench. This is more than the number of application developers I had at SAP..that's also more than the number of engineers at Facebook. So, I said, unless you guys are building a Facebook, this is a colossal waste of human potential," said Sikka.